Cultural Maturity and Complexity

Our world is becoming an ever more complicated place. Globalization makes locales we’ve barely heard of—Azerbaijan, East Timor, Benghazi —suddenly front-page news. Environmental crises remind us of how much we have to lose if we ignore life’s intricacies and interconnections. And the greater pluralism that comes with today’s surrendering of absolutes means a world with every kind of diversity—ethnic, religious, gender, temperament, different ways and degrees of being “abled”—suddenly clamoring for its place on culture’s stage. Today’s reality has more flavors, more dimension, more voices calling out than ever before, and everything points toward our future being even more complex and kaleidoscopic.

Effective future decision-making will require a new kind of relationship with complexity. At the least, we must learn to better tolerate complexity, not run from it or respond reactively. We must also better understand how to manage complexity, and complexity often of a bewilderingly apply-and-oranges sort. In the end, our times challenge us rethink what complexity is about, understand it in new, more complete ways.

We can think of Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes reordering our relationship to, and understanding of, complexity (of all sorts) in four related ways:

First, culturally mature perspective helps us better recognize complexity—how a diverse array of factors are ultimately involved with most any human question. And it alerts us not just to how life’s puzzles have multiple pieces, but also to how very often this is complexity of an “apples and oranges” sort. It makes us more accepting of such more complex complexity and also better able to get our arms around it and apply it to useful ends.

Second, culturally mature perspective brings new attention to relatedness. It helps us see how all questions happen in contexts. It also helps us better appreciate how complexity’s ingredients fit together, helps us understand interconnection and pattern. Recognizing lots of pieces is critical, but by itself it only makes things more complicated. Mature understanding is also about linkages, about wholes as well as parts.

The third piece concerns who we are and how we relate. Cultural Maturity helps us better recognize our own complexity. It also helps us interact in ways that better take complexity into account—we become more able to engage others without projecting and mythologizing. Cultural Maturity’s changes make possible Whole Person/Whole System relationships—this between friends, lovers, between leaders and followers, in community, in organization as nations and as a species. They both support the option of Whole Person/Whole System relating and make the skills needed to succeed at such relating understandable.

The fourth new piece more directly confronts that need to rethink complexity itself. Cultural Maturity’s reframing of complexity involves a leap in understanding, Culturally mature thought is necessarily systemic thought. And it is systemic in a sense we have not before been able to consider. Systemic thinking in the sense of attentiveness to detail and how parts fit together is nothing new. It is what good engineers have done since the days of Stonehenge and the Pyramids (you need this many stones and you fit them together in just this way). Culturally mature perspective helps us understand both difference and relatedness in more dynamic ways. It helps us think in ways that better reflect the fact that we are alive, and more specifically, that we are alive in the particular way that makes us human.

Culturally mature perspective doesn’t reduce complexity In fact it contributes to it. Certainly the way Cultural Maturity reframes complexity gives us even more to consider. But, at the same time, Cultural Maturity makes complexity of all sorts (whatever its source) seem less a foreign presence. It also helps us better understand how complexity works. And often it reveals underlying patterns that make complexity more manageable. If we can stretch sufficiently, Cultural Maturity makes life’s complexities not just more tolerable and comprehensible, but sources of fulfillment and inspiration.

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Cultural Maturity—A Blog for the Future brings mature, big-picture perspective to the important questions of our time.> It is a contribution of the Institute for Creative Development, a Seattle-based, non-profit, non-partisan, think tank and center for advanced leadership training. It is designed to support the sophistication of understanding and decision-making needed if we are to have a vital and creative human future.

The Cultural Maturity Blog is different from most content on the web in essential ways. It can be thought of as a "news blog." But most conventional news becomes old news in a few days. A first way the site is different is that content is included only if it will likely be as or more significant five, ten, or even twenty years from now as it is today. A second way it is different helps clarify the first. The Institute's work centers around the ...

FEATURED BOOK TITLES FROM ICD PRESS

I have now completed work on a new three book series (a ten year effort). Each book has similar intent—to help us make sense of the times in which we live and make sense of what the future will require of us—but has a slightly different focus and is written for a different audience.

Hope and the Future: An Confronting Today's Crisis of Purpose (ICD Press, 160 pages) presents a brief but provocative examination of what hope for the future necessarily depends on. It introduces the concept of Cultural Maturity by examining critical questions and challenges today confronting us as a species. It describes how effectively addressing many of these new questions and challenges will require new human skills and capacities—new ways of thinking, relating, and acting.

Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future (With An Introduction to the Ideas of Creative Systems Theory) is a lengthier effort (640 pages) intended for those seriously interested in developing the new capacities that leadership in times ahead will require in all parts of our lives. It closely examines the changes that the concept of Cultural Maturity predicts and addresses how these changes are already beginning to alter our human landscape. And it introduces Creative Systems Theory as an important example of culturally mature conception.

Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions describes how the new kinds of understanding we need today not only helps us address modern day challenges, they also bring a new maturity and creativity to the more ultimate sorts of questions. It is intended for people who find particular fascination in overarching theory.